A Study on the Practical Carrying Capacity of Large High-Speed Railway Stations considering Train Set Utilization

Methods for solving the carrying capacity problem for High-Speed Railways (HSRs) have received increasing attention in the literature in the last few years. As important nodes in the High-Speed Railway (HSR) network, large stations are usually the carrying capacity bottlenecks of the entire network due to the presence of multiple connections in different directions and the complexity of train operations at these stations. This paper focuses on solving the station carrying capacity problem and considers train set utilization constraints, which are important influencing factors that have rarely been studied by previous researchers. An integer linear programming model is built, and the CPLEX v12.2 software is used to solve the model. The proposed approach is tested on a real-world case study of the Beijing South Railway Station (BS), which is one of the busiest and most complex stations in China. Studies of the impacts of different train set utilization constraints on the practical station carrying capacity are carried out, and some suggestions are then presented for enhancing the practical carrying capacity. Contrast tests indicate that both the efficiency of the solving process and the quality of the solution show huge breakthroughs compared with the heuristic approach.